Give Your Cause Marketing a Little Extra Punch with a Coupon Hangtag

FUZE, the water flavored with juices and milk and fortified with vitamins and minerals, is an existing sponsor of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and several of its flavors carry Komen’s trademarked version of the pink ribbon and generate $0.10 for every bottle purchased.

But to give the campaign a little extra punch, several in my grocer’s refrigerated beverage case recently included the coupon hangtag you see below.

There are a number of tactical advantages of this approach to FUZE, the retailer, and Komen:

The coupon encourages additional purchases.
It can be executed faster than a label change could.
It can be placed on the flavors, like this one, that don’t normally carry the Komen pink ribbon.
It makes the ribbon more visible than the beribboned bottle alone.

The back side of this coupon is blank. It’s a pity that FUZE didn’t turn over that space to Komen for breast cancer information, website links, or inspiring stories about survivors and supporters that FUZE calls Heroes For Hope. Since the coupon doesn’t have to be detached to be redeemed, the whole of the back would have been available for this purpose.

There’s also one notable disadvantage to this kind of paper hangtag; I can guarantee that there are loose hangtags strewn all along FUZE’s distribution network from the factory to the floors of warehouses, transportation trucks, and the store’s backrooms.

Shrinkage, or course, is a cost of doing business. But every hangtag that doesn't stay with its intended bottle is unfortunately wasted.

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The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Stock Index Dramatically Outperforms Other Indices

There are stock indexes galore; the Dow, S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite, the Wilshire 5000, the FTSE, and hundreds more. But how would an index of the stocks of companies that do a meaningful amount of cause marketing perform compared to those well-known indexes? Pretty well, as it turns out.

I first floated the idea of a stock index that would track companies that do cause marketing back in 2009. I tried to figure out Yahoo Pipes so that I could put the feed right into this blog. But alas sometimes the geek gene does fall pretty far from the tree.

So I talked to programmers to see if I could find someone who could do the same, but it was always more than I was willing to pay.

Finally, last week I hired a MBA student to do it all in a spreadsheet, and what do you know but that over the last 15 years a basket of 25 cause marketing stocks dramatically outperforms the Dow, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite, and the Wilshire 5000.

The index, which I call the Alden Keene Cause Market…

Pimping for Constant Contact

OK, not pimping really. More like a gentle noodge to nonprofits and the companies that love them that it’s time to start email marketing.

I was invited to a local presentation on email marketing from Constant Contact, the Waltham, Massachusetts email marketing outfit whose target market is small businesses and nonprofits.

They offer a cause-related marketing campaign called Care4Kids meant to benefit children’s causes. Constant Contact customers are invited to nominate worthy 501(c)(3) children’s charities to receive a free account along with the training to create an effective email campaign.

Non children’s charities are probably still eligible for charity discounts. If you’re outside the United States you might be able to induce Constant Contact to consider your cause. Alternately, you could suggest a similar program to email marketing vendors in your home country.

It goes without saying… I hope… that every nonprofit needs an email marketing component. Email marketing is a good deal lik…

An Interview with Cause-Related Marketing Pioneer Jerry Welsh

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father.
In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign.
I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World, proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing.
Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters and dollars, …

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